Bipartisan Meeting on HealthCare

JWoods

That's because they have NO plan!

This is Paul Ryan's plan:

http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/

bluesapphire

Ahhh ... the good ole "Let's shift the burden of buying health insurance away from employers and onto individuals."

Might as well be the "Why can't $40,000 per year earners just have a savings plan for their health care?" bill.

bluesapphire

One thing that was made clear is that there are many, many points of agreement. So the Republicans are shown to be sort of like the governing body on blood - "yeah, the various components are all good, but don't pass the entire bill!"

LOL@Sixy! Good one.

JWoods

Ahhh ... the good ole "Let's shift the burden of buying health insurance away from employers and onto individuals."

Employers are not giving their employees health insurance - it is taken out of their potential wages. Small business owners and self employed persons individually buy their own health insurance.

But the point was that the constant democratic canard of "Republicans have no plan" is NOT TRUE.

JWoods

One thing that was made clear is that there are many, many points of agreement. So the Republicans are shown to be sort of like the governing body on blood - "yeah, the various components are all good, but don't pass the entire bill!"

It is 2800 pages filled with pork, payoffs, and politics. The Republicans asked to start over and make a bipartisan plan. They wanted interstate insurance availability and tort reform.

Democrats (particularly Obama) have no intention of that - which was made clear in this useless summit.

bluesapphire

Yeah, and we all know what most employers would do with the extra cash. Trickle it down.

Well, the CBO analysis does say, flatly, that “the average premium per person covered (including dependents) for new nongroup policies would be about 10 percent to 13 percent higher in 2016 than the average premium for nongroup coverage in that same year under current law.” This affects the roughly 17 percent of Americans below age 65 who do not get their insurance from their employers.

Why are premiums going up? CBO cites the combination of three factors:

Premiums would be 27-30% higher because coverage would be better. The law, for example, requires that all policies cover maternity care, prescription drugs, mental health & substance abuse and no denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions.
Premiums would be 7 to 10 percent lower b/c of changes to the way the individual market is structured.
Premiums would be 7 to 10 percent lower b/c of an influx of more people, many of them healthy, into the insurance market.

The net effect of those three factors: Premiums would be 10 to 13 percent higher for the average policyholders.\

http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2010/02/a-health-care-summit-fact-check.html

BurnTheShips

This is Paul Ryan's plan:

http://www.roadmap.republicans.budget.house.gov/

And there are other plans also.

Any one of them would be better than the bill under consideration.

BTS

BurnTheShips

Yeah, and we all know what most employers would do with the extra cash. Trickle it down.

You say this because you have a dim understanding of economics, which is further darkened by a class warfare mentality. The market rules.

The market sets total employee compensation levels.

The large employer health care benefits that are now provided must be accompanied by wage reductions, everything else being equal. Removing the cost of paying for insurance from employers would result in wage increases. Over a period of readjustment, the equilibrium would lead to no net change in total compensation.

To quote Jwoods:

Employers are not giving their employees health insurance - it is taken out of their potential wages. Small business owners and self employed persons individually buy their own health insurance.

From a CBO analysis from last year (p167):

Some observers have asserted that domestic producers that provide health insurance to their workers face higher costs for compensation than competitors based in countries where insurance is not employment based and that fundamental changes to the health insurance system could reduce or eliminate that disadvantage. However, such a cost reduction is unlikely to occur, except in the short run.

The equilibrium level of overall compensation in the economy is determined by the supply of and the demand for labor. Fringe benefits (such as health insurance) are just part of that compensation. Consequently, the costs of fringe benefits are borne by workers largely in the form of lower cash wages than they would receive if no such benefits were provided by their employer.

Replacing employment-based health care with a government-run system could reduce employers’ payments for their workers’ insurance, but the amount that they would have to pay in overall compensation would remain essentially unchanged. Even though changes to the health care system could have various effects on the supply of labor, the underlying amount of labor supplied at any given level of compensation would hardly be

affected by a change in the health care system. As a result, cash wages and other forms of compensation would have to rise by roughly the amount of the reduction in health benefits for firms to be able to attract the same number and types of workers.

I am sorry that this link, unlike Sixy's, makes no mention of "full shaft fucking".

http://www.cbo.gov/ftpdocs/99xx/doc9924/12-18-KeyIssues.pdf

BTS